The intersection between Digital Humanities, Digital Humanism, and Media Studies enables new conversations within digital humanities, between the digital fields, and how media studies must become an evolving part of the conversation because of the contextual relationship between what is being studied and the tool being used as a part of said research. Where Matthew Gold suggests that there is little difference between the Digital Humanities and Digital Humanists “The Digital Humanities Moment,” others insist that Digital Humanities tends to focus on literary and textual analysis and Digital Humanists explore how humans interact with evolving technologies. The intersection between these two areas, however, requires a re-envisioning of how we define both of these areas. Are we not interacting with technology differently when analyzing a text? Likewise, do new technologies enable us to bring a text to life in ways that allow a different form of analysis? And, where do we draw the lines between analyzing a text, studying how we as humans interact with the digital tools that allows us to research that text differently, and examining the digital tool itself?
Because digital humanities encompasses the use of digital tools to assist in humanities based research, a compilation that considers the intersection of how scholars in various fields use the same tools and/or technologies for different purposes should be considered. These “disciplinary modes” of using such tools may provide an opportunity for more robust uses of the tools, which can lead to more interdisciplinary methodologies and analysis of the work we do and the critiques of the tools themselves.
The evolution of the terms, digital humanities, digital humanists, media studies and the range of the type of work that is done using digital technologies has called for an interrogation that combines this type of digital work and the practitioners, makers, scholars, that have created this discourse. Digital technologies have not only changed how we exist in this world and with one another but has spawned entirely new sets of research questions that were not possible before the advent of new media and technology. Our thinking is that rather than bring a collection that focuses on a discipline-digital literary studies, media studies, Africana studies, musicology, digital social sciences -by focusing on tools, we show how digital humanities may be used to develop methodologies, pedagogies, and practices that are interdisciplinary, timely, and multimodal.
For this Research Topic we are seeking papers related to the study of digital humanities as a discipline; the examination of digital projects that are computational and interdisciplinary; scholarship that examines digital tools in research and pedagogy; and how humans interact with digital technologies (such as immersive and tactile technologies and social networks). We encourage authors to submit along with their essays a variety of media forms, which may include screenshots, links to short video clips, audio clips (MP3s), and/or access to a respective digital site. Submissions should include your name, title of your paper, any academic or community affiliations, email address and a 150-200 word abstract.
Keywords: Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Visualization, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Digital Humanism
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
